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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Confession Booth
Last fall, I taught my very first college class—an essay-writing course for freshmen. I was excited, but wary of first-time-teacher pitfalls, and so I asked my professor friends for as much advice as possible. After extensive feedback, I attempted to design my syllabus in such ...

The Naked City
It was 1994, I was sixteen years old, and I was taking two trains each day to get to the remnants of a neighborhood Bostonians of a certain age still called “the Combat Zone”—the onetime red-light district, the site of my first job. At 29 Temple Place, the cheery managers ...

Birdies of America
How about ducks? They still exist! Have a look. One nice thing about ducks is that it’s the females that are called “ducks”; the males are “drakes.” In duck land the female is, for once, Simone de Beauvoir’s Absolute, the representative of the species, while the male ...

Delusion at the Gastropub
It takes a lot of high-capitalist pixie dust to turn the basics of subsistence into coveted luxuries. The brazen marketing of designer water at $5 per bottle, flown in from Fiji or the Alps—or better yet, filled from a local municipal tap—may have been the first red flag, ...

Knock Yourselves Out
From 2012 to 2015, one of our most reliable national punch lines was Bruce Jenner. Husband, then ex-husband, of Kardashian reality-show matriarch Kris Jenner, Bruce Jenner had not yet come out as a trans woman, meaning our only real hint of the change ahead came from distant ...

W(h)ither the New Sensibility
Who would have thought that Susan Sontag’s “One Culture and the New Sensibility”—widely regarded as an opening salvo in the long culture war against “elitist” standards”—is now fifty years old? I revisited Sontag’s celebrated essay because I was reading a new ...

The Metropolitan Museum of Rot
Americans are used to hearing the story of our decrepitating urban life as one of cultural, moral, and even spiritual decline—as though cities were still the demonic precincts of bunko and vice featured in the grim third acts of Victorian melodramas. As satisfying as such ...

Despair Fatigue
Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?  There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to happen in Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue. For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly on the left, has made an art out of despair. This is the ...

The New Man of 4chan
“The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America,” announced one commenter last year on the giddily offensive /r9k/ board of the notorious, anarchic site 4chan. “This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun. Soon, more of our brothers will take ...

Taking Liberties
Like the slow-motion collapse of most empires, the end of Chuck Dederich’s sprawling rehabilitation-cum-alternative lifestyle community, Synanon, began with an unforgivable—and some say uncharacteristic—act of hypocrisy. Dederich was playing The Game, the confrontational ...

Keep Fear Alive
Can we imagine a free and peaceful country? A civil society that recognizes rights and security as complementary forces, rather than polar opposites? Terrorist attacks frighten us, as they are designed to. But when terrorism strikes the United States, we’re never urged to ...